Re-Inventing the Facebook Interface with Analytics

Microstrategy Alert and Wisdom

When you take a look at the “stickiness” of the experience and amount of consumer information on Facebook, you see many intriguing concepts that make marketeers salivate:

23% of all users spend over six hours per day on Facebook

Facebook users 8x more likely to interact with brands they like than twitter

Over 50% of Facebook users are more likely to recommend brands to friends/family after “liking” them on Facebook

However, the chronological and/or “highlighted” order of Facebook’s information presentation can be a challenge. For brand marketers, it can be difficult since often the flow information from friends, family, etc. can push branding content “below the fold”. Facebook users often face the same challenge with the chronological/highlighted presentation:

“Where was that info on Brand X? I can’t find it in my news feed.”

To solve these challenges, Microstrategy via their Gateway for Facebook framework has put together some alternatives for both marketeers and users to break free from traditional Facebook interfaces.

Wisdom

Organizations are making the leap from simply having a Facebook page to developing a Facebook application for self-service customer care or customer transactions. With this move, marketeers in the organization want to know more about the people who are using the application and how to best segment those users for internal cross-/up-sell treatment and external analysis. To help, Microstrategy built MicroStrategy Wisdom™. Wisdom is a B2C visibility application that pulls information – in strict accordance with the Facebook privacy standards and workload constraints – via Microstrategy Gateway. This information is then presented using the power of the Microstrategy data visualization and analysis facilities to provide marketeers with an out of the box information experience that combines the power of Facebook data with the visualization of Microstrategy.

Alert

Likewise for Facebook users, Microstrategy as an application – Alert – which allows consumers to filter the information of their favorite brands away from the traditional Facebook interface. Alert presents information to Facebook users in a way that they can pull information from their favorite brands without navigating either their own newsfeed or that of their favorite brands. Alert allows customers the ability to access that content in a static fashion more consistent with the structure of webpages and less like the timeline flow of Twitter. The twist is, that as users utilize the Alert interface, more “customized” content can be made accessible by the brands and thus continuing the appeal of the Alert interface. For example, self-service care documents, how-to and special announcements can be placed in Alert to improve a customer’s experience as well as engagement.

Data and Information Synergy

Both the Wisdom and Alert applications and the Gateway framework provide Microstrategy with the ability to leverage two significant resources: Facebook’s data and Microstrategy’s presentation and analytics. I look forward to hearing more from Microstrategy on the success of these initiatives as companies adopt Wisdom for Facebook app customer insight and users adopt Alert for content management and organization.